Waking the Moon (66 page)

“Annie.”
I fell back as she pushed past me into the room. “Uh—jeez, it’s uh—it’s great to see you.”

“I’m underwhelmed,” she said, and grabbed me in a hug. “Remember me? The girl least likely to succeed in a long-term heterosexual relationship?”

I laughed. “I dunno, Annie. I think I was in the running there for a while.”

She dropped her knapsack to the floor. “So: you happy to see me, or is that a roll of pennies in your pocket?” She grinned, but her voice sounded strained. As though she was putting on an act for me, as though if she gave me the chance to think, I’d change my mind and push her right back out the door.

“Of course! Here—sit, sit,” I urged, pointing her to the couch. “You want something to drink? No kidding, Annie, it really is great to see you. I mean it.”

I hesitated, went on in a rush, “This is
so
weird. There was just something on the news about the Divine, and I’ve been thinking of calling you, but I didn’t know how to find you. Did you hear about Baby Joe?”

She nodded, her expression guarded. “Yeah. I meant to call you when it happened.” She sank onto the couch, tugging at her cowlick. “I know this is totally nutso, me just showing up like this—”

“No—I’m glad, Annie, really, I’m so happy you—”

“Well, you might not be so happy when you hear why I came.” She sighed and leaned back into the couch. “God, I’m so exhausted. Can I crash here tonight?”

“Tonight? Sure, Annie, of course—” A little warning beeper went off in my head, reminding me that tomorrow was Dylan’s birthday: I’d have to find some polite way of kicking Annie out by then. “You look beat. Don’t you want something? I think there’s some orange juice—”

“Orange juice sounds great. You know, I had some of that stuff on the train the other night—that Pernod shit you used to drink in school.” Annie shook her head. “Now I know why you were always so nuts.”

I hopped into the kitchen and got the juice. Dylan was finishing off the chips and salsa; before I could say anything he started into the other room. I hurried after him.

“Dylan—uh, wait a sec—”

Annie looked up just as the two of us came through the doorway. The blood drained from her face. For a moment I thought she was going to scream.

“Annie! This is Dylan—Dylan Furiano.” I gestured weakly at Dylan with the glass of orange juice. “He’s—he’s Angelica’s son,” I went on breathlessly. “Annie is a friend of mine. We all went to college together. Your mom and Annie and I. Dylan’s father was Angelica’s husband in
Italy,”
I ended, willing Annie not to bring up Oliver’s name.

“Hi,” said Dylan politely. He smiled at Annie. She nodded—too fast, as though someone in a dark alley had just asked for her wallet.

“Yeah,” she replied in a hoarse whisper. “I—Angelica? Angelica di Rienzi?”

“She’s my mother.” He peered more closely at Annie. ‘You look kind of familiar …”

I slapped my forehead: I was not handling this well
at all.
“Dylan, this is Annie Harmon—Annie Harmony, I guess you are now, huh?” I gave Annie an anxious look. I had the uneasy feeling that everyone in the room was covering for someone else, except for me.
I
was standing all alone out in the field, waiting to be plowed down.

“Annie Harmony?” Dylan tilted his head, suddenly exclaimed, “The singer?”

“Dylan,” Annie was saying, her voice carefully modulated. “Angelica’s son Dylan. And—”

I coughed loudly; I would have kicked her if I’d been a few inches closer. Annie whistled and gave me a sideways glance, her dark eyes narrowed so that she looked like an animal that’s just been poked with a stick.

“Sweeney Cassidy
and
Angelica’s son Dylan,”
she said. “Dylan and Sweeney. Now I must have missed the pilot for this show, because I am
very
surprised to—”

Dylan stepped around Annie to stand awkwardly beside me. “I bet you girls have hair and fingernails to discuss, so maybe I’ll go pick up something for dinner. Is that okay, Sweeney?”

“That’d be great, Dylan. Thanks.”

He leaned down to brush his lips against my cheek. “See you later, Sweeney. Annie—”

Annie nodded, forced a smile so false I was glad Dylan was out the door before he could see it. I watched him go, then turned to Annie and said, “Well, hey, how about that orange juice.”

Annie glared at me. Her face was dead white except for a fiery red spot on each cheek. “Yeah? Well hey, how about telling me who the
fuck
that is?”

I bit my lip. “Well, actually, Dylan is—”

“I know who he is! Anyone with half a brain can see who he is! The hell with Angie—that’s
Oliver’s
kid!”

She began to pace furiously across the room, punching the air with her fist. “Jesus Christ, Sweeney! I almost had a heart attack—I thought he
was
Oliver.
What
is he doing
here
? What are
you
doing—”

I shoved my hands into my cutoffs and glared back at her. “What am
I
doing? I
live
here—”

“What is
he
doing here?”

“He
lives here! What are
you
doing here?”

Annie stopped and stared down at the harvest table. She reached for the sea urchin lamp, moving her fingers across its tiny raised nodes as though she were reading braille. Suddenly her expression changed. “I remember this,” she said softly. “This was Angie’s …”

I nodded. “She—she sent me that for Christmas, that first year …”

“That only year,” Annie said, but there was no malice in her voice. “It always sort of gave me the creeps, this lamp. But it looks pretty in here.” She sighed and turned, leaning against the table. “Man, it’s hot. Where’s that orange juice?”

I handed it to her, went and got the rest of the pitcher. “Here—” I poured her another glass. “Why don’t you sit, Annie? It’s too hot, and we don’t have air-conditioning.”

I could see her flinch when I said
we,
but she said nothing, just flopped onto the sofa and rested the glass against her forehead for a few minutes.

“Okay,” she said at last. “I feel better now. At least I don’t feel like I’m gonna run screaming out into the street and have fits.”

I laughed. “Why not? Everyone on Capitol Hill has fits.”

Annie sighed. “Right—Capitol Hill. Baby Joe said you lived on Capitol Hill.”

I hesitated, then asked, “Is that—is that why you came here? To tell me about Baby Joe?”

Annie shook her head. “No. Not really. I mean, if I just wanted to tell you about Baby Joe, I would’ve called, probably. No, this is—well, this is a little more than that.” She fixed me with a sharp glance. “A
lot
more.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Annie,” I settled next to her on the couch, reached over to give her a tentative hug. “Try me. I’m more open-minded than I used to be.”

She snorted. “No kidding. Open-minded Sweeney Cassidy, the girl with a hole in her head. I’m sorry—it’s just a shock, you know? I haven’t seen you in—what? Nineteen years?”

“Twenty, almost.”

“Twenty years! And here I walk in and it’s like a fucking time warp, you and Oliver …”

“Yeah, well, imagine how
I
felt.”

Annie rested her elbows on her knees and looked at me, head cocked. “All right, girl. Shoot. Tell me how it felt.”

I told her about Dylan. Everything about Dylan, up to and including about how the night before at Kelly’s he’d asked me to marry him.

Annie cupped her chin in her hand. “And you said you’d wait for him to grow up, no matter how long it takes. How romantic.”

“Fuck you, Harmon. I told him I’d marry him in a New York second.”

“Wow.” Annie looked at me with wide eyes. “Really? You said yes?”

“Of course I said yes! I’m in
love
with him, Annie.” I tried to keep my voice from sounding desperate. “He’s—he’s everything I never thought I’d find. He’s everything in the world to me,” I said softly. “Everything.”

I looked up, expecting to see Annie’s mocking gaze or worse, her anger. Instead she was staring at me as though she’d somehow walked into a stranger’s carriage house; which, I guess, she had.

“You said you’d marry him. Too much. And obviously he doesn’t know who his real father is,” she mused. “Which is probably for the best…

“Well. He sounds nice,” she said after a long silence had passed. “Really, he does. I guess it’s just that—well, some kind of intense stuff has happened to me in the last couple of months.”

“Like what?”

She shifted uncomfortably on the couch, finally curled up into the corner facing me. “Well, like—like I guess maybe I’ll have to wait a few minutes before getting into it. This is a lot to think about, after all this time. Right here—”

She gestured at me, then at the little room around us, with its ancient beams and slate floor and books and rose petals strewn everywhere.

“All this, and you, and him.” She was quiet, and stared thoughtfully out the front window; then she asked in a low voice, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Sweeney, but—well, are you sure it’s Dylan you’re in love with? I mean, you really used to bang your head against the wall over Oliver—”

“I’m sure,” I said curtly. “I haven’t thought about Oliver in years and years.”

Which was a lie, of course. Annie didn’t seem to believe it for an instant.

“Really? I have,” she said, almost dreamily. “I thought about him, and you, and Angie, all the time. All the time. Especially Angie.”

She pulled a pillow into her lap and kneaded it, and I was shocked to see her eyes were red. “I thought about Angie for years. Fucking years, girl. Did you know we slept together?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said awkwardly. “But—well, I’m not surprised. You probably weren’t the only one.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Annie’s face twisted, and she held the pillow so tightly her fingers were white.

“But I
wanted
to be the only one! I was so gone over her, I was
insane
for her. That time I found you in the room—I wanted to kill you, Sweeney, I mean, really kill you. It was like when I found out about what happened to my cousin Lisa—”

“But you know it didn’t mean anything, Annie! I was drunk, that was such a horrible night, and she—”

“I know what she did. She did the same thing to you that she did to me, that she did to everyone. She
used
you, Sweeney. She used us all.”

Annie’s expression was so vehement, her eyes so black with rage that I moved a little closer to my end of the couch.

“Annie,” I said gently, trying to be careful with my words, “I’m sure Angelica didn’t mean to hurt you. I don’t think she meant to hurt anyone. Things were different then, you remember what it was like—
lots
of people slept with their friends. We didn’t know.” It was like letting something go, that had been caged inside of me. “We were just kids, Annie. That was all. Besides—”

I pointed at the ring on her right hand. “You’re a big star now. You can’t be living alone.”

“I’m not.” Annie straightened, tilting her chin defiantly. “My lover, Helen—we’ve been together for almost eight years now. Shit,” she added under her breath, “I think our anniversary’s coming up, too, I got to remember that. But that’s not what I meant, anyway.”

“Then what
did
you mean?”

“I mean that she used us.
Really
used us—starting with me, and you, and Baby Joe, and Hasel, and
then
Oliver …”

My heart clenched, but I only nodded. “And Oliver.”

“And I don’t know who else, over the years.” She pulled the pillow to her chest. “Have you been following Angelica, Sweeney?”

“You mean, watching her career?” I shook my head. “No. I never heard from her, after—after what happened. Until this summer, as a matter a fact. I saw her on TV about five or six weeks ago, I guess it was right before I met Dylan. But he’s told me about her, so I know about her from him. Why?” I asked guardedly. “Have you been in touch with her?”

Annie let her breath out in a long low
whoosh.
“I have been doing everything on god’s green earth
not
to be in touch with her.”

She stood and crossed the room to stare at the sea urchin lamp. When she turned back to me she was pale but very calm.

“I don’t know exactly
what
she is, Sweeney, but Angelica is dangerous. I mean
fatal.
She killed Baby Joe, and she killed Hasel; she’s killed people we’ll never know about,
hundreds
of them—thousands, maybe. Homeless people, runaways, people nobody would ever miss—you ever seen statistics on how many people just disappear, like that?”

She snapped her fingers and I jumped. “You know, I’ve known people who’ve seen snuff movies—movies where people literally get fucked to death, and someone’s there behind the camera watching it all, and someone else is out there to market the stuff, and someone else is there to buy it … You like to think something that horrible could never happen, that it couldn’t be real; but it is, Sweeney. It is.”

Her eyes grew wide and unfocused. “It’s like we spend our whole lives walking on this little rind that covers the world, this little crust that’s got flowers on it, and dirt and houses and families and—and then one day, you break through, you just fall right through, and you see there’s something else there. The
real
world, the world that was there a million years ago, the world you see when you’re a kid alone in the dark; the world that fills your worst dreams until you can’t even wake up screaming from it, you can’t wake up at all …

“I’ve seen it, Sweeney,” she whispered. I swallowed, thinking back to Balthazar Warnick’s room at the Orphic Lodge, hobbled creatures whirling ecstatically around a single thin flame. “I’ve
seen
it, and you’ve seen it, Sweeney—that world is
real.
It’s real, and Angelica’s tapped into it. Whatever she is, whatever she’s made herself into—she’s found a way into that place. She’s found a way to bring it here—”

Her hand slashed through the shadows. “To
make
it here. And she’s doing it by feeding off all of us. It’s like she set out to be some kind of crazy goddess of love, Ishtar or Mary Magdalene or whatever the hell she thought she was—but somehow she’s really done it. She
has
turned into a goddess. She’s got her bible, and her cult, she’s got some kind of fucking black angels picking off kids from here to Seattle—”